To prepare for the assignment, Marina and I met last week to go through my recent acquisitions from several contributors: the Spanish poet Jorge Reichmann, SLU professor of Spanish Steven White, Oliver Baudach at Hatch Kingdom, and Gabriel Garcia Ruiz and other contacts in Spain. Marina and I put together seven sets of eight stickers each representing a variety of socio-political themes: the environment, political parties, gender, the Spanish Constitution, workers’ unions, student strikes, and the Catalonian separatist movement. Students will work in pairs to write short bilingual description fields for each sticker that will be added to the Street Art Graphics digital archive. It’s a lot tougher than it may sound to write these description fields. One needs to list all of the visual and textual elements (subjects, logos, colors, composition, graphic design, etc.) and outline what these elements represent or mean. Descriptions are limited to 150 to 200 words each in English and Spanish.

“In the spring of 2012, in response to the Spanish government’s severe austerity measures, Spanish miners from Asturias united to raise awareness and call for justice. With high unemployment, the miners became guerrilla freedom fighters looking to save their jobs and the mining industry. The protesters went on strike in late May and shut down the country’s coal supply to protest the government’s decision to reduce mine subsidies by 63 percent. Anticapitalistas.org is the Web site for Izquierda Anticapitalista, an organization that fights against ‘oppression, exploitation, and the domination of people and nature.’ The sticker depicts the profile of a man wearing a knitted watch cap and a bandana to conceal his identity. The sticker also contains a QR code, easily scanned with a smart phone application to spread the resistance movement.”

“This tribute sticker presents a photograph of Lluís Companys i Jover over stripes of yellow and red, two colors synonymous with Catalonia and the region’s long struggle to become an independent state. Companys was actually born in 1882 and was the leader of the Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya (ERC) or Republican Left of Catalonia. Founded in 1931, the ERC remains a nationalist party that seeks independence from Spain. Companys served as President of the Generalitat of Catalonia between 1933 and 1940. After the Spanish Civil War, he went to France but was later captured by the Gestapo secret police and sent to a Spanish jail where he was tortured and later executed by a firing squad. Companys was one of the most influential martyrs of the Catalonian separatist movement, and his death has inspired thousands of nationalists who seek independence.”

As a side note, I needed to scan some additional stickers yesterday for the upcoming assignment. My associate at work, Carole Mathey, asked if it was a hassle to do all this scanning, but I described how it allows me to get to know the stickers a little better. Sometimes I see things in the digital image more readily than in print, and the scanning, cropping, and color correcting forces me to look very closely at each image. Carole called it “speed dating.” A muted, light grey version of Picasso’s Guernica is represented in the background of this sticker underneath bold red letters, for example, which I didn’t notice until I scanned the sticker.